"Knit & purl" sweater no 2

"Knit & purl" sweater, a photo by Asplund on Flickr.

Here's a sweater I finished for my mother recently, "Knit & purl" from Classic Knits by Marianne Isager. These pattern borders are a lot of fun to knit, easy but enough variation to keep them from getting monotonous.

I've taken a couple of liberties with the design, though:
1. The original is a raglan sweater. I do like raglans, but thought these horizontal borders would look better in a straighter shape.
2. I knitted the pieces back and forth instead of in the round. It's easy with this kind of pattern, and I wanted to accentuate the side seams with vertical lines similar to where I picked up stitches for the sleeves and the sleeve seams.

side seam

I was lucky enough to get to the right length with the diagonal borders, so the shoulder join looks nice:

shoulder join

The sleeves were too long first, but as I had knitted them top-down it was easy to fix: I ripped the cuff and let border above it become the new cuff. I thought of ripping that border too and reknit the 2x2 cuff pattern, but thought it looked nice with the diagonal lines.

The first sleeve version; I think the final one looks better.

Unfortunately, this yarn (BC Lucca Fino) has been discontinued, but at least I have enough of it for another sweater in my stash.